Posts tagged with: acton institute

On Friday afternoon, Acton Institute President Rev. Robert A. Sirico joined Neil Cavuto on Fox News Channel to discuss the notable lack of outrage on the part of the media in response to the slaughter of Christians by terrorist organization ISIS.

Yesterday, Acton’s Director of Research Samuel Gregg made an appearance on Relevant Radio’s The Drew Mariani Show to discuss Pope Francis’ recent comments calling money “the dung of the devil,” setting them in their proper context and discussing the Pope’s comments on cooperative organizations as well. You can listen to the interview via the audio player below.

Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg joined Al Kresta on Ave Maria Radio’s Kresta in the Afternoon on Tuesday to discuss the interesting public relations dilemma of Pope Francis: on the one hand, it is alleged that faithful Catholics may be “checking out” of his papacy due to his perceived liberalism on economic and social issues. On the other hand, the honeymoon period that Francis enjoyed with the media and left-leaning Catholics may be coming to an end as it becomes apparent that he will not be making major changes to longstanding teachings of the Catholic Church.

In its eighth annual survey, the Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania put the Acton Institute among the top organizations in social policy, advocacy, conferences and overall excellence. The 2014 Global Go-To Think Tank Index published by the Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program, which has a database of more than 6,500 organizations, ranks the world’s leading think tanks in a variety of categories and across a wide political spectrum. The rankings are compiled with the help of a panel of over 1,900 peer institutions and experts from the print and electronic media, academia, public and private donor institutions, and governments around the world.

Highlights from the 2014 report:

• Acton Institute 9th in the Top Social Policy Think Tanks (11th in 2013) • Acton Institute 29th in Top Think Tanks in the United States (34th in 2013) • 11th in Best Advocacy Campaign (10th in 2013) for PoveryCure.org • 17th in Best Think Tank Conference (17th in 2013) for Acton University

In its new report, the Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program noted that although the raw number of think tanks around the world has declined slightly, think tanks “continue to expand their role and influence in countries around the world.” The need for think tanks as key players for a flourishing civil society remains strong:

Across both developed and developing countries, governments and individual policymakers face the common problem of bringing expert knowledge to bear in government decision-making. Policymakers need reliable, accessible, and useful information about the societies they govern. They also need to know how current policies are working, as well as possible alternatives and their likely costs and consequences. Although this need has long been an inherent dynamic of the policymaking process, the forces of globalization have accelerated the growth of independent think tanks given their unique ability to strengthen the research-policy bridge and increase the quality and effectiveness of policymaking. This expanding need has fostered the growth of independent public policy research organizations in 182 countries around the world.

Even as the scope and impact of think tanks’ work have expanded, their potential to support and sustain democratic governments and civil societies is far from exhausted. The challenge for the new millennium is to harness the vast reservoir of knowledge, information, and associational energy that exist in public policy research organizations to support self-sustaining economic, social, and political progress.

Samuel Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute, joins host Al Kresta on Ave Maria Radio’s Kresta in the Afternoon to discuss the level of discomfort that some conservative Catholics have felt in recent months with the pontificate of Pope Francis. Is the pope a liberal, as he is sometimes portrayed by the media? Does he hold to longstanding teachings of the Catholic Church? Gregg and Kresta address these and other issues, and take calls from listeners in this half-hour long interview.

Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg has a busy calendar of media appearances these days; late last week, he joined host Sheila Liaugminas on Relevant Radio’s A Closer Look for a full broadcast hour to discuss the upcoming year in politics and wider society. That interview is available for your listening enjoyment via the audio player below. He’ll also be appearing this afternoon during the five o’clock hour on Ave Maria Radio’s Kresta in the Afternoon; streaming audio will be available at that link.

In an interview on Christian distance education, Dylan Pahman, the assistant editor for Acton’s Journal of Markets & Morality, talks about the education bubble, rising costs of higher education, and whether Christian worldview integration in a distance education program is worth a premium:

Luke Morgan: As a blogger for the Acton Institute, you have written about the education bubble, the textbook bubble, and other items regarding what education costs, and how those things should work in a free market. Could you describe to me what you mean when you say: “the education bubble?”

Dylan Pahman: The idea of a bubble came up in relation to the housing bubble which took place in 2007 in the recent recession. Part [of what] happened is, the government started subsidizing home loans, because they decided “everybody aught to be able to own a home.” So there were good intentions, but what they were doing, was cutting away the calculation of risk… The bank is no longer turning people away, that they normally would have… you have easy access flooded into this market for something people really desire… a nice place to live. In doing so, [the market] ended up ballooning. Demand keeps going up, and as demand goes up the price goes up. So people are getting into more and more debt, for the same exact product until it gets to a certain point where it’s too much, too many people couldn’t handle it, and so a lot of people ended up foreclosing on their homes… it was pretty severe, and it went past the housing market, it effected our whole economy, it effected worldwide economies.

Every Wednesday we publish the Acton Commentary, a weekly article that covers topics related to Acton’s mission. As 2014 comes to a close I thought it would be worth highlighting the superb commentaries that have been produced by Acton Institute staffers over the past year.(more…)

At The Gospel Coalition, Hunter Baker reviews Abraham Kuyper’s Scholarship: Two Convocations on University Life and highlights the significance of the Acton Institute:

The Acton Institute does the kind of work that would have been almost unimaginable in a single organization two or three decades ago. Here we have a think tank that teaches economics and political theory to seminarians and other students of religion, maintains an office near the Vatican, and publishes translations of the works of Abraham Kuyper, one of the most illustrious Reformed thinkers in Christian history. If one ever needed evidence of positive rapprochement for the church in the wake of the Reformation, Acton provides a giant serving.

While Acton has published—through the Christian’s Library Press—some contemporary authors (including yours truly), the big headliner is Kuyper and his translated works. Many American Christians have read his Stone Lectures delivered at Princeton, but most of his output has remained inaccessible. Acton is changing that.

The Acton Institute was privileged to host William B. Allen earlier this week as he delivered a lecture as part of the 2014 Acton Lecture Series. His address, entitled “American National Character and the Future of Liberty,” was a powerful examination of America’s national character, beginning with George Washington’s declaration in 1783 that “we have a national character to establish,” to Frederick Jackson Turner’s work 110 years later on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” to the progressive project to shape and shift our national character throughout the 20th century up until today. Allen’s lecture is truly a university-level class on American history and political philosophy, and bears repeated watching in order to fully grasp the depth of his presentation.

William B. Allen is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and Emeritus Dean, James Madison College, at Michigan State University. He served previously on the United States National Council for the Humanities and as Chairman and Member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Additionally, he serves as Veritas Fund Senior Fellow in the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University and also as Visiting Professor, Ashland University, Ashbrook Center, Master’s in History and American Government.

The Acton Institute is currently hosting an art exhibit called “Holodomor: Through the Eyes of a Child” in our Prince-Broekhuizen Gallery at the Acton Building. It features artworks created by contemporary Ukrainian children commemorating the great famine of the 1930s that was inflicted upon Ukraine by Stalin, resulting in the deaths of almost 7 million people by starvation.

The exhibit is the brainchild of Luba Markewycz, whose aim is to shed light on this largely unknown chapter of Ukrainian history and expose the tyranny and inhumanity of Stalin’s Communist regime. On November 6th, Markewycz – who is a teacher by profession, and has served in many roles at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago – was joined by Acton’s Director of Research Samuel Gregg to discuss the exhibit and to shed light on the terrible historical events that it commemorates.